Hello there! How’s autumn (or spring) treating you? I think I am still in denial and have refused to turn the heating on yet but I know the time will come sooner rather than later. As I mentioned in my journey update  I want to do some reviews for you of online classes and books I have found useful and I will begin with the first online class I took called “Fair Isle Crochet”.

Before I get on with the review I would like to make clear that I have not been sponsored by Craftsy (trust me I am not that popular), I bought this class with my own money and the opinions written here are my own. So first, if you haven’t heard of Craftsy they offer online classes of various things such as knitting, crocheting, cooking, sewing, gardening, cooking, quilting and much more. The videos are available on any device you want, in HD quality and you can keep them forever, there is an app for iPad and iPhones and you can even watch the class offline. You will get your list of materials and patterns needed for the class to download and then you are ready to go. You should note that Craftsy is US based so their patterns will be in US terms.

First, I really liked the quality of Craftsy classes. Videos are in good quality, you can slow them down, make notes on the video, ask questions to the instructor, join discussions and share your projects. If I had an iPad I would find the app very useful, wouldn’t really watch the videos on my phone but maybe some of you would like that.

The class was Fair Isle Crochet by Karen Whoolie and covered the following: introduction to fair isle crochet, reading charts and working fair isle crochet. After this you are talked through 3 patterns using this technique: a shawl, a trivet and a hat.

The first three lessons teach you about this technique and how to work it, and I learned some really good things such as how to keep your designs from leaning, how to get nice floats, what type of stitch is good to use for fair isle, how to change colours and I specially loved the way she weaves in ends, which applies to any crochet project and not just fair isle. The instructor is very clear in her explanations and I think someone that has never done fair isle before could follow it with no problem.

The only thing I didn’t like is her way of getting a reversible fair isle fabric with clean colour changes and no leaning of the design. I was quite excited to learn how she would achieve this because it is something I have always wondered and only have been able to do it in the round. If you are working flat once you turn your work around the designs look a bit distorted unless they are big shapes, anything more intricate gets a bit lost. She does achieve this but her method is so painfully slow and it leaves a million ends to weave in so I was a bit disappointed. It is fine for a trivet and she does explain how to make it easier to hide the ends but I just wouldn’t use her technique in a project because I would get bored very quickly. Otherwise, I really enjoyed the first three lessons to apply them for projects in the round.

Finally there were the projects. Of course not everyone is going to like all the patterns but they each teach you a bit more about how to work fair isle. The only one I would do for myself would be the hat, but I still enjoyed seeing the lessons for the other projects and seeing the technique in action.

Overall, I recommend this class to anyone interested in learning fair isle crochet, if you already know the basic technique then maybe you should see if you like the patterns and decide if it’s worth it for you. The class costs £25 full price but to be honest I wouldn’t have bought it at that price. They do sales VERY often and got mine at £9.50 which is very reasonable for the content and three patterns. 

Hope that was useful 😉 I just started another class on Craftsy about tunisian crochet so stay tuned because this time I am going to share my learning experience with you guys step by step… more soon!

x

Sol